Installation

sftpman provides the base library and the command-line application sftpman.

sftpman-gtk provides the sftpman-gtk application, a GTK frontend to sftpman.

Defining filesystems

Each filesystem managed by sftpman needs to have a unique name/id which will be used when managing the system and also in its mount path.
A system with an id of my-machine will be mounted locally to /mnt/sshfs/my-machine.

Authentication with the remote filesystem during mounting can be performed using passwords or SSH Keys.

To define a new remote filesystem with password-based authentication using the command-line tool, do:

The above setup is the minimum you need to specify to define a new filesystem that sftpman can mount.
Depending on your environment, you may need to use some more options (like --port, which defaults to 22). To see a full list of available options do:

# sftpman help

You can also use the GTK frontend to define new filesystems more easily.

Mounting/Unmounting

Once you've defined several filesystems, you can mount them by using their ids.

Removing defined filesystems

Learning more

To see a list of more commands and options that sftpman supports, consult the help:

# sftpman help

Troubleshooting

sftpman can perform some basic checks on the environment, which may catch some potential problems:

# sftpman preflight_check

If the GUI application does not ask you for a password while mounting (when using password-based authentication or for password-protected ssh keys), you will need to install an ssh askpass tool, see Sftpman#Mounting/Unmounting.

Note: If mounting a filesystem fails, sftpman will give you the full sshfs command and its output.
You can then use that command and run it manually (possibly after adding some more debug options to it, so you would see some more output).

When doing authentication using keys, start small and make sure SSHing actually works by trying it manually, before trying to use sshfs. Some common problems can be solved by consulting Using_SSH_Keys#Troubleshooting.